The auditors at Baymard Institute will write a detailed 130+ page report with 50 research-backed suggestions for improvement. Each suggestion includes a description of the identified user experience issue along with a proposed solution and 1–4 best practice examples from leading e-commerce sites.

6 detailed UX scorecards with a total of 550+ UX performance scoring parameters, used for direct UX performance comparison against competitors among the top 60 grossing US and International e-commerce sites.

A 2-hour video conference where we go over the audit results with you and your team, to discuss the audit results and suggestions for improvements.

A full-site UX audit includes 4 months of free access to the Baymard Premium ‘Medium’ plan with full access to Baymard’s 37,000 hours of UX research findings.

Alex Wright,
Director of Research at Etsy

“Thank you. This was an excellent piece of work: professional, thorough, and actionable for the team. We're very happy with the work Baymard has done for us so far, and I hope we'll have the chance to work together again on future projects.”

Audit Focus

You can choose to have one or more elements of your site (or prototype) audited. Most clients combine all of the 6 audit focus areas below into a ‘Full-Site UX audit’:

Search Experience (on-site search): the type of search queries the search engine supports, what and how your product data is searched, the logic for your autocomplete suggestions, how users are guided in case of partial matches, “No results” pages, the layout and features of the search results page (including faceted search logic), etc.

Mobile Specific: In addition to auditing all of the above site elements on your mobile website, Baymard will also audit for mobile specific issues, such as how the interface handles users’ lack of page overview, touch interactions and hit areas for the main menu, mobile image zoom, mobile search , mobile touch keyboards, design deviations between mobile and desktop, etc.

Intermediary Category Pages
How deep in the site hierarchy “Intermediary Category” pages are used (vs. using a product listing page), how the category pages are structured and what content they contain, incl. inspirational paths, featured products, and curated content, etc.

2) On-Site Search Audit

The On-Site Search UX audit focus area includes a full analysis of the following elements:

Query Types
The level of compliance with 12 different overarching types of search queries that users make on e-commerce sites, all vital for your search engine to support (Exact, Product Type, Feature, Thematic, Relational, Compatibility, Symbol, Subjective, Symptom, Implicit, Non-Product, and Natural Language). How and what product data is actually searched.

Search Form & Logic
The design and behavior of the search field itself, query persistence, manual and automatic search scope selection, special characters, etc.

Autocomplete
How the autocomplete feature (“predictive search”) should be designed, the types of suggestions it should make, keyboard behavior support, suggesting scopes and products, etc.

Credit Card Form
The credit card field design and its validation logic and formatting, along with the expiration date, security code, and cardholder name inputs, field sequence, card icons, and card type selection

Form Design & Features
How to design and position the primary button, “Apply” buttons, minimizing form intimidation, multi-column layouts, tabbing flows, CAPTCHAs, back-button and enter-keystroke behavior

Validation Errors & Data Persistence
How to design and position error messages, how to word them, and persisting data in non-secure and secure form fields, along with inline validation

Address Validators
When address validations are necessary, “Force-Proceeding” through address validators, along with address validator design and logic

“Competitive UX audits”: in addition to your site, we’ll also audit any competing e-commerce site(s) you’d like, for a direct competitor UX performance comparison (this is in addition to the comparison to the 60 top grossing US, European and International e-commerce sites, which is included with all audits).

Will Close,
Director of A/B Testing at Nike.com

“Intelligent, consumer-focused insights that are clear and actionable. The team in the room really loved the way the Baymard Institute highlighted the optimizations in the various user experience elements (copy, layout, design, calls-to-action…), from the perspective of consumer struggles. Baymard’s Usability research really complements our other existing research tools.”

Who Are UX Audits for?

Most commonly, UX audit services are used by:

E-commerce sites that would like to benchmark their UX performance to see how they stack up against major competitors and “State of the Art” e-commerce sites, to know where resources are best spent on further UX improvements.

Sites that would like inspiration and verification of their new redesign. It can even be before spending resources on the final design and code — auditing prototype designs is cheaper than re-coding.

Optimized e-commerce sites that need a pair of external and unbiased eyes to identify the last tweaks and improvements.

Agencies, designers, and tech vendors that want reassurance that they’re on the right track with their client’s e-commerce design.

Return on Investment: Even the smallest improvement in conversion rate for any e-commerce site with significant sales will lead to a notable return on investment. For example, an improvement from 3.1% to 3.6% in conversion rate for a site with $50,000,000 annual sales will yield $8,060,000 extra sales every year.

Sudeep Agarwal,
Growth Manager at Google Express

“I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for the amazing work on this audit. You should know that this has been very well received internally and there's a lot of excitement around adopting the ideas you have shared.”

How Will the Audit Be Delivered? What Will It Cost?

A full-site desktop and mobile UX audit across all 6 audit focus areas costs $9,700 (USD) — this includes a volume discount of $2,700 compared to the rate for 6 individual “focused UX audits”.

A ‘Full-Site UX audit’ includes:

A full UX review and analysis by Baymard’s team of UX researchers of both your desktop and mobile websites’ homepage & category nav., search experience, product listings, product details pages, and checkout flow.

A 130+ page audit report with 50 prioritized suggestions for improvements. Each of these 50 suggestions explain the identified usability issue, the suggested change, and provide 1–4 best practice implementation examples from other leading e-commerce sites.

Six detailed UX performance scorecards with a total of 550+ review parameters, and with performance comparison against 60 top-grossing US, European, and International e-commerce sites.

A 2-hour video conference with you and your team to discuss the audit results.

A full-site UX audit includes 4 months of free access to the Baymard Premium ‘Medium’ plan with full access to Baymard’s 37,000 hours of UX research findings.

Reach out below to discuss your needs or request a UX audit of your site.

Refund policy: In the event that we’re unable to provide 40 suggestions for improvements we’ll still complete the audit and leave it up to you if you want a refund.

All client-specific audits and UX scorecards are strictly confidential; they are not included in Baymard’s public benchmark databases or shared with anyone else.

As Baymard does not offer any kind of web design service, programming, or sell e-commerce technology, the UX audit will therefore always be a completely unbiased analysis of your site, and not an indirect “sales pitch” for other services. At Baymard our specialization is the UX auditing.

What Some of Our Clients Say about the UX Audit:

Colleen Kersting,
eCommerce Marketing at Harley-Davidson

“We found the audits extremely helpful and validated a number of changes we have been wanting to make or are in the process of making, so thank again for all the great insights.”

Cat Brunson,
UX Manager at Columbia Sportswear

“This was indeed very helpful guidance and a very well-documented roadmap for us to fix, validate, organize, collectively understand and continually improve our ecommerce foundation.”

Abraham Berkowitz,
B&H Photo

“I can confirm that the list was fully implemented. Every time we put up a change we either A/B test or we watch it very closely to determine that it's doing better and not the opposite. So I can confirm that these fixes have improved our checkout. Thanks for everything.”

Marc Ulrich,
Associate Director of Web Usability at Bell Canada

“Thank you for the UX audit presentation, it was FANTASTIC. People here are quite pleased and amazed by the amount of work that was put into this.”

Chris O’Donoghue,
Search & Navigation Product Owner at John Lewis

“Many thanks for presenting earlier. I have caught up with the teams and they all found your audit report really useful and are on board with the suggestions.”

“Thank you very much for the 7 usability audits of our country-specific sites. The audits have provided us with specific and actionable advice, allowed us to prioritize development resources , and enabled us to compare UX performance between the 7 different country-specific sites, and against State of the Art implementations. The audit itself is done really professionally and the recommendations contain actionable and insightful information.”

Will Close,
Director of A/B Testing at Nike.com

“Intelligent, consumer-focused insights that are clear and actionable. The team in the room really loved the way the Baymard Institute highlighted the optimizations in the various user experience elements (copy, layout, design, calls-to-action…), from the perspective of consumer struggles. Baymard’s Usability research really complements our other existing research tools.”

Nicole Papp,
Merchant Success Manager, Shopify

“We've received some awesome feedback from our Merchant Success team as well as our merchants about all of the UX Audits we've had thus far with Baymard. Thank you so much to you and your team for all of your hard work. The pilot with Baymard has been going fantastic and I'm really excited with all that we're learning! You have an amazing platform, team and super helpful data base for us to work with.”

Kerry McAleer-Forte,
Director of User Experience Research at Sears

“Baymard produces some of the most relevant and actionable user experience research available. They really understand the needs of UX and Product Management professionals, and their deep experience in the eCommerce field allows them to offer sophisticated, nuanced insights.”

“Thanks for everything. The audit was extremely useful, I think we have gained valuable insight.”

Sudeep Agarwal,
Growth Manager at Google Express

“I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for the amazing work on this audit. You should know that this has been very well received internally and there's a lot of excitement around adopting the ideas you have shared.”

Wendy Bonnstetter,
UX Director at Hallmark Cards, Inc.

“The walkthrough today was great. The report was very, very well done and loaded with great opportunities for us to improve our business. I wanted to again express my appreciation for working with us on such a condensed time frame last month. You and your team have been amazing partners to us and we very much appreciate the work, expertise and partnership.”

Jaime Wilson,
Sr. Director of Design & Development at Overstock.com

“Thanks again for the great work on our checkout project. Our whole group found it incredibly insightful. We’re applying the suggestions you provided to our new checkout design which launches at the end of the month! One of my colleagues was also interested in your group’s competitive expertise with regard to responsive web and native apps.”

Bryan Trogdon,
Director of User Experience at Office Depot

“Baymard has been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”

Alex Wright,
Director of Research at Etsy

“Thank you. This was an excellent piece of work: professional, thorough, and actionable for the team. We're very happy with the work Baymard has done for us so far, and I hope we'll have the chance to work together again on future projects.”

Matthew Gardner,
Director of UX at Sports Authority

“Thank you for all the value delivered ahead of our new fiscal years. Your insights not only provided a definitive foundation for our UX roadmap but completely sold our executive team on the value of expert usability insights. Your service paid for itself in a matter of days and ensured all critical gaps will be filled ahead of us running the audit again next year.”

David Polanco,
UX Lead at Carnival Cruise Lines

“We like what we are reviewing from the audit - great analysis and feedback.”

Justin French,
Director of E-commerce at Fast Growing Trees

“We implemented this [1 of the 15 audit suggestions] and since then we’ve had a 20% increase in warranties added and a pretty healthy average order increase because of that. That was a great suggestion, it hit our bottom line immediately.”

Louis Parizeau,
VP of Marketing at Altitude Sports

“Let me say that it was exceptionally well done, and we are super excited to implement every one of the recommendations there. Everything you said has usually been a case of discussion in the past, but having them recommended in a deck like this will allow us to move forward.”

Greg Dalby,
Director of E-Commerce at Purch

“Really good rundown on all these thing. I definitely think we got a lot of value out of it, and we’re excited to get it all in and do some A/B testing on this.”

Chris Hall,
President of RepairClinic.com

“Within a very short time Baymard Institute provided 15 clear, useful improvement suggestions for our checkout process. We intend to implement all of them. It’s easy to find companies that offer website improvement suggestions. But, most companies don’t do their homework and don’t provide specific examples of how best to make the improvements. With Baymard Institute, the checkout process suggestions they made were intuitive, specific, and actionable. I highly recommend their audit service.”

Erin Straub,
UX Design Manager at Nutrisystem

“The recommendations in our Checkout Usability Audit were awesome - well prioritized, actionable and helped us focus on what to optimize. This audit, along with the e-Commerce Usability Reports & Benchmark Databases, are my go-to resources for thorough, insightful information. Thank you!”

Anthony Thomas,
UX responsible at StickerMule.com

“Wow, this is great! Just reviewed it with the team. It's a huge help and we're excited to fix these issues.”

Efe Yaman,
Program Manager at n11.com

“We have worked with a number of third party companies before on various projects/audits, and I can certainly say that working with Baymard was not only a pleasure; but you delivered on time; to the level of depth we wanted; addressing important issues; and answering all our questions; and you did all this for a great price. A big THANK YOU on behalf of N11.”

Ramona Rejali,
Senior UX Designer at prAna

“Wanted to thank you again for the checkout audit and walking us through the process. It was super helpful and we can't wait to apply the changes to our checkout for a better user experience.”

Aaron Henig,
Operations Manager at Epicenter Consulting, New York

“Given the tricky science of conversion rate optimization, it is great to know that you are dealing with professionals whose advice is based on solid research. It was a pleasure collaborating with the Baymard team.”

“Baymard recently did a UX audit of our new e-commerce Website. We were very pleased with the results. The report and live review of the findings validated our approach to user experience, and also, we learned a lot about best practices for e-commerce UX. We believe Baymard’s work will help us increase revenue and user satisfaction.”